IPv6: The New Internet Protocol

Anyone interested in the technical details of IPv6 will want a copy—even if you are prepared to wade through the relevant RFCs, IPv6 provides annotated references to these and other important papers at the end of each chapter.

IPv6: The New Internet Protocol

Author: Christian
Huitema

Publisher: Prentice Hall
1996

ISBN: 0-13-241936-X

Price: $44.00

Reviewer: Danny Yee

Huitema's IPv6 is a concise but
comprehensive description of the new Internet protocol. It begins
with a very brief account of the motivation for a new protocol and
the background to its selection (the competition between the
different contenders), then plunges straight into the technical
details: a chapter describing the basic packet format; one on
routing and addressing; chapters on auto-configuration, security,
and support for flows; a chapter on transition issues; and a final
chapter in which Huitema offers his personal opinion of the major
decisions made in the protocol design.

Each of the chapters goes into some detail. The chapter on
security, for example, describes the Photuris key exchange system
quite thoroughly, while the chapter on flows enters a little into
the issues of fair queuing. Each chapter also discusses the points
which were controversial in the decision process: such things as
the length of the addresses, the mandation of potentially
unexportable security support, the relationship between IP and ATM,
and the choice of a dual-stack approach to IPv4-IPv6 integration
rather than use of header translation. I felt that
IPv6 had much more meat to it than Bradner and
Mankin's longer IPng (Addison-Wesley 1995),
but the two books are really complementary, with the latter dealing
more with the historical context and the framework within which the
decision was made than with IPv6 itself (the difference in titles
is appropriate).

IPv6 is a very nice little volume,
marred only by poor proof-reading—there were far too many simple
grammatical mistakes, and at least one spelling error which any
automated spell-checker should have found. Anyone interested in the
technical details of IPv6 will want a copy—even if you are
prepared to wade through the relevant RFCs,
IPv6 provides annotated references to these
and other important papers at the end of each chapter.

Disclaimer: I received a review copy of
IPv6: The New Internet Protocol from Prentice Hall, but I
have no stake, financial or otherwise, in its
success.

Danny Yee
(danny@cs.su.oz.au)
All book reviews by Danny Yee are available via anonymous
FTP: anatomy.sy.oz.au in /danny/book-reviews (index INDEX).